Biometrics and the Underclass
India is forging ahead with biometrics in both government and commercial applications. There does, however, seem to be a distressing pattern emerging in the use of biometrics as it applies to the lower class members of Indian society. A review of several announced and/or implemented programs indicate a willingness to deploy biometrics to identify the poor, powerless, and disenfranchised with the promise of improved services and safety.
Rural ATM Banking: Several banks - including Citibank and Punjab National Bank - are offering biometrically enabled ATMS in rural India. The goal is to bring banking to the "underbanked" i.e. rural, illiterate or semi-illiterate poor. This does provide services that were not previously available and does offer some measure of protection against a manual and corrupt hand-me-down system that often resulted in theft from those least able to protect themselves or afford it.
However, these ATMs also benefit the financial institutions pursuing the two thirds of the Indian population currently not connected to the banking system. Are biometrics really required? Does the use of this technology only benefit the banks? And, most significantly who is watching out for the rights of these rural underbanked?
Cleaning up the Streets for the Commonwealth Games: Concern about the level of begging in New Delhi ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games has prompted the city government to introduce biometric identification for all people caught begging on the streets. The authorities claim they want to identify habitual beggars so they can be rehabilitated. Of the 2537 beggars arrested in 2007, only half were convicted due to lack of eyewitness testimony (who wants to testify against a beggar?) Though officials of the social welfare department and police commission stress that beggary should be decriminalized and a new rehabilitation and legal framework should be built, it is not clear how biometrics will impact this situation except to build a database of suspected beggars.
Biometric Ration Cards: The government has enrolled iris images from 80 million people in Andhra Pradesh to control and manage the distribution of state-issued food ration cards. The government intends to create a large centralized database to reduce fraud and fraud related costs by positively identifying individual recipients. The database has yet to be built, let alone the IT system to support it. How this data will be stored, managed, and used has yet to be defined.
None of these programs is innately discriminatory. And biometrics certainly can be an effective tool to serve the underclasses. However, exclusive application of this technology to those least able to complain, question, or resist is troubling. In many cases applying biometrics to "them" (whether "them" is defined as India's poor, travelers to the U.S. from non-visa waiver countries or migrant workers from Mexico, foreign workers in the UK, or European asylum seekers) is far easier and less politically charged than applying biometrics to "us". And this may provide the "slippery slope" shortcut privacy and civil liberty advocates have been warning about for years, ultimately expanding the use of biometrics from "them" to "us" without ever having undergone adequate debate, controls, or the development of appropriate legal frameworks.
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March 10, 2008
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